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<title>Importing your data from a database</title>
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<h1>Using a Proprietary Database as a JMoney Datastore</h1>

<p>If you have accounting data stored in a database, you can
continue to use the same database as a back-end for JMoney. There is no
need for any data conversion and, furthermore, you can use JMoney and
you existing accounting software side by side.</p>

<p>This does require some development work. You will need to write a
plug-in that supports your database. The plug-in must have
implementations that can materialize the various accounting objects
(accounts, currencies, transactions) upon request from data in the
database and implementations of iterators that return lists of objects
from the database (e.g. a list of all entries in a given account). The
plug-in decides what is cached in memory and what is read from the
database upon demand.</p>

<h2>What if I do not want to develop a plug-in for my database?</h2>

<p>If you do not want to continue to use your existing database then
you can more simply convert the data to a format that can be read by
JMoney. If you current accounting program supports export to Quicken
Interchange Format (QIF) then you can import your data into JMoney using
QIF files.</p>

<p>If your accounting software does not support QIF or if the QIF
export process drops information that you want to keep then you can
write a script to convert the data to XML format (which can be read by
JMoney) or you can write a simple plug-in that can read your data from
the database and import into JMoney.
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